


the valiant never taste of death but once.

by Ias



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Pre-Canon, Seduction, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Everything tbh, Unhealthy Relationships, Violent Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-01 05:45:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12698565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: It is the days of Asgard's greatest glory. In the building of an empire, no one's hands are clean.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I know that in the comics Valkyrie's name is "Bruunhilde" but I also saw she was based off the mythological figure "Brynnhildr"--and I liked that better, so here we are :')
> 
> Sigdis = the woman who dies in Valkyrie's flashback of battling Hela

There’s always a draft in the Bifrost chamber. Brynnhildr knows it makes no logical sense—there’s no air in space. But standing before the blank portal looking out on the stars, she can feel the hair twitching faintly against her skin, a warm breeze that smells like lightning. The air hums on a frequency that isn’t quite sound, like the rasp of wind over a sharp metal edge.

There’s no official reason for her to be present. There are, in fact, some fairly compelling and undeniably official reasons for her to be at her post patrolling the city on the other side of Asgard. But the Bifrost, she reasons, is technically part of the city. Connected to the city. And maybe that logic wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but if Sigdis is going to upbraid her for insubordination she’ll have plenty of opportunity to do it as soon as she steps back onto the _terra firma_ of home. Judging by the other members of the Valkyrior mingling with the worried-faced civilians in the chamber, she’s not alone in her thinking.

“The Commander lives.”

Her eyes dart to Heimdall, sharp with accusation. He stands, as he ever does, with his hands gripping the hilt of his sword, legs planted like a statue. She knows how far Heimdall can see, but has to hope he can’t look deep enough to see the knot closing around her heart with every breath.

So she tosses her hair and loosens her sword in its sheath, turning her eyes back to the gaping portal of stars before them. “Who’s asking?”

Heimdall does not look at her, but the faintest curve of a smile touches half his lips. “Thought it might interest you.”

“Well, I’m not interested. I mean, I already knew that. Sig— _Commander_ Sigdis can take care of herself.”

Heimdall says nothing. He’s very good at that, becoming a blank wall of sheer gold that nonetheless remains vaguely judgmental. “She’s my commanding officer, and a damn good warrior,” Brynn says, half to herself. “She doesn’t need me worrying about her.”

“Then why have you sheathed and unsheathed your sword six times in the past five minutes?”

Brynn’s fingers fly off her hilt like it burned her. She glares into the abyss before them, molars grinding indignantly. “Shut up.” The low rumble that travels through Heimdall’s chest might even be a chuckle. Until the rumble grows deeper, traveling up through the soles of Valkyrie’s boots to jar her bones like a tuning form, and the gold of Heimdall’s armor flashes as he raises both his arms.

“They come,” he says, and plunges his sword into the matrix.

The chamber walls come to life around them, circles within circles spinning faster and faster. The wind picks up, hot and dry and electric; Brynn watches as the stars flicker, grow brighter, and then burn like flames devouring the empty spaces between them. Colors leap and bleed. The fabric of everything is a river flowing towards them. And then—

Odin emerges first, striding out of the maelstrom with his staff in hand, golden cloak sweeping out behind him. Brynn inclines her head; it’s not respect so much as an irresistible impulse, muscle and bone bowing beneath a great and awful weight. But the light flickers, and condenses, and the bright shadow emerging from the Bifrost solidifies into the horned shape of a monster.

She stalks at Odin’s right side. Where his movements are stiff with formal dignity, she moves like a serpent slithering towards a mouse. Her armor is red. Not by design, but in practice—gore splatters her breastplate, her greaves, and drenches her hands up to the elbows like gloves. The tangled antlers of her helm sit upon her head like a crown of swords, her eyes two pits of darkness beneath the battle-paint.

Brynn is not aware that she is staring. Not until the goddess of death turns her head, and out of the darkness is the pale glint of her eyes. Like the glint of a dagger in the dark. A flash that had Valkyrie’s hand groping numbly for her sword, lacking the strength to close around it. The curve of a smile that digs into Brynn like a hook.

And then Hela passes by, and all Brynn feels is cold. A blood-loss kind of cold, the cold of something torn out of you and cast ten feet away on a battlefield, the cold that wells up out of pain and sweeps forward like an irresistible tide. Brynn has seen her fair share of bloodbaths. More than a few intimate brushes with death. She glances at Heimdall beside her and realizes he’s staring at her hard. Maybe it says more than it should when she looks away just as quickly. Soldiers stream past her on all sides, faceless and far away.

“Brynnhildr!”

The voice snaps her out of the cold haze closing around her. A strange shape is stumbling towards her through the crowd, a multi-limbed cluster that resolves itself into three figures leaning together, the one in the middle sagging and stumbling between them. Brynn is at her side before she’s aware of moving, wrapping an arm around her back and pressing a steadying hand to her breastplate. Her eyes move quickly, cataloging. Dried blood matted around a gash above her hairline. An arrow-wound in her left thigh. Dented breastplate—broken ribs at the very least. But alive. Just as Heimdall said.

Sigdis glances up from behind the curtain of her bloodied hair to see Brynn at her side. Her mouth twists into a rueful smile that quickly becomes a grimace. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Brynn keeps her eyes on their feet, matching their pace like steps in a jerking, awkward dance—and conveniently avoiding eye contact at the same time “Yeah, well. You’re not supposed to be hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“Shall I let you go, then?”

Sigdis leans a little more heavily on her in response, her fingers reaching up to clasp Brynn on the back of her neck. Their grip is strong, and warm, and step by limping step Brynn guides her home.

 

* * *

 

Nights on Asgard are bright and cool. The air seems to grow thinner somehow, the cosmos above hanging low against the city spires. The windows in Sigdis’s room stand open, curtains drifting in the breeze; Brynn has stoked the fires high. They sit on the bed, heat and cold washing over them in equal measure, Sigdis’s head in Brynn’s lap as she finishes cleaning the blood from her golden hair. The healers took care of the worst of her injuries, but there were plenty of others who needed their attention and Sigdis refused to stay. Her eyes are closed as Brynn runs a comb through her hair, a bowl of water turning pink beside her as she rinses out the blood. Eventually Brynn sets the bowl and the comb aside, and simply runs her fingers through it.

Sigdis hums in the back of her throat, and drags her thumb across Brynn’s knee. When her eyes open again they drift over the collection of empty bottles clustered in one corner of the room in the semblance of neatness, the clothes and armor tossed over chair backs. “You’ve been sleeping here.”

“You said that I could.”

“I didn’t think you would. But I’m glad you did.”

Brynn knows she should reach for the words deep inside her, the pit where she’s pushed every sentimental thought she’s ever had, to be dragged out thrashing and clawing at times such as these. _I wanted to wake up feeling like you were close._  

Instead she just shrugs, and leans over to refill both their goblets of wine. She’s always been more of an ale girl herself, but since Sigdis is the one who has lost a significant amount of blood recently, she gets to pick their poison tonight. “Come on, down the hatch. You need to replenish your fluids.”

Sigdis turns over in Brynn’s lap to offer a raised eyebrow. “Is that an official medical treatment?”

Brynn shrugs, and throws her head back to polish off her entire glass of wine in a couple of swallows. It’s rich, and sweet, and heady. She takes a moment to confirm that Sigdis is watching her through her lashes before sliding her thumb over her lips to catch the final red drops. Sigdis’s eyes are half-lidded as she levers herself up from Brynn’s lap. But when she leans in, it’s not for a kiss. She reaches for the other goblet of wine on the bedside table before settling back into the cushions, her expression inscrutable.

“You shouldn’t have been at the Bifrost,” she says at last.

Brynn forces a laugh, turning away to hide the disappointment in her eyes. “I can’t say I expected a lecture on proper protocol tonight.”

“It wasn’t appropriate.” Her words are very careful, very flat. Sigdis takes a long drink to hide behind her goblet, and when she lowers it again her eyes fix on her own fingers as they turn the cup in circles. “How you express yourself around me in private is one thing, but abandoning your post to greet me at the door is highly improper—”

Brynn forces a laugh. “What does propriety have to do with it? Everyone knows what’s going on between us.” 

Sigdis’s head snaps up. “And you don’t see that as a problem? I am your commanding officer, Brynn. The fact that this even happens in secret is bad enough—”

“No one cares.”

“ _I_ care.”

Brynn holds her eyes for two heartbeats before climbing off the bed. The decanter of wine is on a low table near the window, seven paces away. She might as well be walking across all the nine realms, the way time drags with every step. Wine sloshes into her cup and then onto the wood, her movements too fast. She fills it to the brim and then drinks half it down before Sigdis’s sigh breaks the silence behind her.

“But more than that, I care about you. _You’re_ the one who will suffer the worst consequences if someone should decide to make trouble with us. I need to know that you can still follow orders without letting your feelings for me color your actions—”

Brynn turns around, swilling the wine in her glass. The smile on her face is tight. “Is that the reason why I was given guard duty before you left on the latest campaign? Left behind with the old and the sick?”

“You know damn well that’s not what it was about. Someone has to protect the home front.”

“Is that all I’m good for?”

“Brynn, stop it.”

Brynn turns away, setting her wine goblet back on the table and grabbing the decanter once more. It gushes out like an arterial wound before she slams it back down again. The rim is at her lips before Sigdis’s voice, very soft, comes from behind her again.

“Come back to bed. Please.”

After a long silence, the goblet clinks against the table again. Brynn crosses the room back to the bed and climbs in without meeting Sigdis’s eyes. Like they have done so many nights before, Sigdis rolls over and Brynn settles in behind her, an arm thrown over Sigdis’s waist, breathing in the smell of her hair. The bitterness of blood still hangs around it. Brynn inhales it deep.

“You could have been hurt out there. Worse than you were.” It’s not really what Brynn means, but saying _you could have died_ is too heavy a sacrilege in the safety of Sigdis’s bed.

“But I didn’t.” Sigdis shifts closer to her, pressing her back closer to Brynn’s warmth and lacing their fingers together across her belly.

Brynn does not pull her closer or squeeze her hand tighter. She lies there still and quiet until Sigdis rolls over to meet her eyes.

“You still want to join the vanguard.” Brynn says nothing. Sigdis’s fingers slide up her arm, flit over to trace the curve of her jaw and run down the runes marking her face. Her expression is strange. It’s—sad.

“Don’t,” she whispers. “Stay here. You shouldn’t have to see it. To bear it.”

“I’ve seen battle before.”

“Not like this. Brynn, not like this.” Sigdis’s grip on her jaw tightens. “Promise me you won’t go.”

Brynn reaches up to close Sigdis’s fingers in her own. She is silent, and eventually Sigdis understands. There are dark spaces within them both, and neither has ever been good at reaching into them. Brynn leans down to kiss her instead, and Sigdis opens up to her like the dying gasp for air.

 

* * *

 

Fine white streams around Brynn’s boots like smoke as she strides across the training field. Every step dislodges more to the mercy of the wind, which blusters over the dark roofs and spills into the flame-lit courtyard. Brynn’s cloak snaps like an angry dog at her heels. The faceless specter which stands before her flickers and frays at the edges where the wind and sand whip through it. She adjusts her grip on her sword and begins the drill again.

It’s a challenge, sparring with illusions. They don’t have weight or momentum the way warriors of flesh and blood do; though the training program attempts to compensate, it cannot stop her sword from swinging through empty air instead of meeting a parry. They whirl around each other without touching, each block gliding into the next attack until Brynn’s sword is a spinning halo around her, catching the guttering light of the braziers in the deep blue of predawn. The wind whips her sweat away before it can sting her eyes. She doesn’t stop until her sword whistles through the illusion’s incorporeal neck, and it flickers red once to signify a hit before disappearing entirely. The hovering disk which projected it drops to the sand. Without pause, Brynn stoops to reset it.

A whinny sounds over the dull roar of the wind. Brynn’s head snaps up to the sound; at the edge of the field, her horse Agni stands with his head raised and his ears flicked back against his skull. One hoof paws the sand nervously. Brynn’s eyes scan the empty field around her, the islands of flickering torchlight in the soft blue dark; along the open walkway which borders the training ground, every doorway is closed tight against the weather. Her winged horse is a beast bred for war; the last time Brynn saw him so agitated was on Vanaheim, when a pack of direwolves had ambushed her patrol. There are no wolves on Asgard. Except, of course, for one.

Fenris’s keeper leans on a pillar in the deep shadows at the edge of the sand, arms crossed over her chest. Her pet is nowhere to be seen. Hela has left her battle-armor behind, her hair unbound from her antlered crown to flick like serpent’s tongues around her cheeks. In the low light of the braziers, Brynn can just make out the glint of her eyes. Watching. Coldly amused.

Brynn hesitates a moment, shifting the grip of her sword in her hand. Hela is, after all, the heir to the throne. In theory, Brynn should bow.

“Don’t stop on my account.” Hela’s voice carries across the distance between them on the howling of the wind. Brynn holds her gaze a moment longer. Her instincts are prickling just as Agni’s are. As if they’re both prey. She is _not_ prey.  

Brynn turns her back as if the goddess of death isn’t standing behind her, and continues with her drill. It isn’t long before she slips back into the familiar dance, matching time with the flickering illusion before her until there’s nothing but breath and the burn of muscle and the point of her sword.

She dispatches the illusion twice more before glancing over her shoulder. Hela hasn’t moved. The light in the sky is growing brighter but the darkness that surrounds her is unchanged. Her eyes are like two pits, even without the black of her battle-paint. The longer she stares, the harder it is for Brynn to look away. That same bone-deep cold is creeping through her again, sending a shiver up and down her spine like fingernails trailing her vertebrae. When Hela steps forward Brynn doesn’t even have the presence of mind to take a corresponding step back.

“I know you,” Hela says. Her voice is as deep as space, sharp with amusement. There’s something rough and careless about it, like a hint of a brogue. “You waited at the Bifrost for your Commander to return.”

Warning bells sound in the back of Brynn’s mind, but the alarm is muted, distant. “No crime in that.”

“Of course not.” Hela’s eyes widen fractionally, an attempt at feigning innocence by someone utterly unfamiliar with it. Her every word falls into place as deliberately as blades slipping between ribs. “I was only surprised that, for all the _concern_ you showed at her well-being, you had not accompanied her in battle to begin with.”

“My place was on Asgard.”

Hela tilts her head. The smile is back. “Why?”

“Someone has to protect the home front.” The words drag up the back of Brynn’s throat like jagged fingernails. They sound even worse when she says them. Even more like an excuse.

“It seems strange to me,” Hela says at last, “that such a skilled warrior of Asgard should be treated like a pretty piece of glass. You don’t strike me as the breakable type.”

“I’m not.” Brynn turns back to the illusion disk, twisting the runes to begin a new program; her fingers grip it too tight.

“And yet here you are. Perhaps that’s why you choose to spar against a light show rather than flesh and blood. No use preparing for a fight you’ll never see.”

Brynn ignores her, beginning the drill anew. The burning in her muscles is a pleasant, if ineffective, diversion. Hela stands just in the corner of her vision, the wind pushing her hair in front of her face like a veil. Watching. Brynn feels her head being tugged in that direction, the need to challenge Hela’s gaze or to try and guess what Hela was seeing. Luckily, Brynn is a stubborn bastard on the best of days. She keeps her eyes on the work of her blade.

“She was injured, was she not?”

Brynn falters. The illusion’s sword slips neatly beneath her guard and up between her ribs. She doesn’t feel it of course; it’s all just light and sound. The fury that sparks to life in her chest is an unrelated side effect.

She turns back to see Hela inspecting her nails, one hand on her hip. “It does happen, sometimes,” she continues. “Even for us Asgardians, battle can be a risky endeavor. It is always better to have someone at your back. Someone _invested_.”

Something is churning in the pit of Brynn’s stomach. When Hela’s eyes raise to meet hers again, it lurches. This close, Hela’s power is like standing beside a glacier on Jotenheim. Cold radiates from her. It makes Brynn’s knees want to buckle, so she can crawl closer.

“Anyway,” Hela says, her voice growing bored as quickly as a shift in the wind. She turns away, glancing over her shoulder at Brynn as the sand rises from the heels of her boots with every step. “You’re welcome to join us on our next campaign. I can use talent like yours.”

Brynn watches her cross the training field back to the shadowy terrace beyond. By the time she finds her voice, Hela is almost gone. “My orders are to remain on Asgard.”

Outlined against the darkness of the doorway, Hela pauses. When she turns around, her smile is wide.

“Do you know who I am, Valkyrie?” Brynn’s silence is affirmation enough. “If the goddess of death calls you to battle, there is none who may contest it.”

Brynn’s heart pounds in her chest long after Hela is gone. She’s frozen in place, thoughts whirling like particles of sand through her mind. The grey light of dawn creeps over the training field, the wind dying down to little more than a whisper; it’s a gentle, rosy world, with Brynn standing like a sliver of something hard and sharp lodged in its soft center.

With a single flick of her sword she slices the training disk in two, and leaves it spluttering and dying in the sand behind her.

 

* * *

 

The army musters at dawn. From high above, the glint of swords and armor turns the Bifrost into a length of grey steel lying against the water—a sword to slide into the heart of whichever realm Odin desires next. Agni’s wings beat a steady rhythm as Brynn guides him above the bridge’s length, towards the golden dome which rests at the edge of the world. It has been only a month since the troops returned last. The battles are coming faster now. Always more to conquer.

Brynn has not seen Sigdis since the night before, when they were trapped inside her bedchamber without speaking or touching, like two wild beasts penned in too close. Probably better to have spent the night alone, except Brynn could not bring herself to leave. Not when she knew how things were about to change.

Brynn had not told her of her encounter with Hela on the training field; there was no reason to. But the longer the memory sat in her chest, it began to feel less like a meaningless encounter, and more like a secret. And like wine going sour, the secret became a lie. When Brynn made her decision to accept Hela’s invitation to the vanguard, the idea of explaining herself to Sigdis was impossible. And so she had said nothing, and they’d spend their final night on Asgard with a silence and distance neither of them fully understood.

The broad entrance to the Bifrost chamber is crowded with warriors, mounted Valkyior at the front of the column. The arch which spans above it is decorated with images of Asgard’s previous conquests. Agni deftly lands on the bridge’s glassy surface, and Brynn guides him through the crowd to the place she knows is waiting for her. Heimdall towers over all on the dais, sword gripped in both his hands; Odin on Sleipnir and Hela on Fenris, staring out into the stars as if choosing which one to close their fists around next.

To Odin’s left, Sigdis sits straight-backed in her mount’s saddle. Attentive. Blank-faced. She does not see Brynn drawing nearer. At the last moment Brynn tugs on Agni’s reigns, bringing him to a halt. A few paces more, and she will step into Sigdis’s line of sight. But she’s not looking at Sigdis now.

Beyond the thronging warriors in the chamber, Hela rears like a shadow over a steely sea. Her eyes are darkened with her customary war paint, framed beneath the curving metal of her helm. Brynn stares; Hela’s head turns. Her crown glints like a crow’s wing under the golden light of the chamber. Her eyes lock onto Brynn. She  _smiles_. And at once, Brynn is dragged forward like a fish on a line, until she takes her place at Hela’s right hand.  

Sigdis’s eyes meet hers only briefly. A flash of pain, and understanding. Brynn holds her eyes as long as she can bear, a challenge and an apology and a promise—of what, Brynn isn’t sure. There’s no time for words. Brynn has never been much good with them.  

So they both turn back to the gateway before them, as the Bifrost spins to life with a sound like the cosmos ripping apart, and the armies of death are thrown into the stars like a spear.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The air is full of sound and movement. Shrieks and cries from rough, inhuman throats. The flurry of dark wings, feathers drifting to the cluttered ground like soot. The carrion crows are so thick in the air that Agni cannot fly. At the place where the field meets the wood, Brynn stands and looks out on the once-verdant fields of Vanaheim. There’s not a single spot of green in sight.  

The dead are an unholy crop lying thick on every hillside. Some are Asgardian. A very small few. Most are pinned to the ground by the dark blades that killed them, a thicket of swords rising towards the black cloud which swarms in the sky above them.

A crow alights on the body nearest to her, its scaled legs gripping the necrosword planted in the corpse like a flag. It begins to pick at the ragged flesh around the wound, and the body twitches with every jerk of the beast’s head. Brynn watches. She is too tired to shoo the scavenger away, too tired to even stop watching. She wonders vaguely where Sigdis is; knows only that she is alive. They glimpsed each other across the field of battle, when everything was finally over. Neither had the energy to inject any kind of meaning into their gaze before Sigdis turned away first.

Now Brynn is alone, with no orders to regroup with the rest of the vanguard until the finalities of Vanaheim’s surrender have been negotiated. Odin is sitting in their mead-halls at this very moment, breaking their bread with hands freshly washed of their warrior’s blood. The thought of food makes Brynn vaguely hungry, and that hunger makes her sick.

Her body feels hollow, waiting for the ache and tremble of her muscles, the cramped pain in her sword-hand, the flush of exhilaration spreading over her skin; all the familiar signs of a battle well-fought, and hard-won. In truth, Brynn had scarcely done any fighting at all. She and the rest of the vanguard had stood and watched, as the heir to Asgard’s throne had strode towards the onrushing army, her green cloak rippling like molten glass, two swords appearing from nothing in her hands.

Perhaps the armies of Vanaheim had not known what they were charging towards; or perhaps they did know, and refused to die cringing. At the last moment, Hela had raised her arms. The dead had no time to cry out. The screams all came from the living.

Odin’s army had poured into the hole she carved in the enemy forces like blood filling a gaping wound. Their purpose was not to win the battle, but rather to clean up what was left.

That should probably horrify her, the way it did for Sigdis. In truth, Brynn doesn’t feel much of anything.

The crow picking at the nearby corpse hops onto the body’s chest, its head cocking thoughtfully towards the warrior’s open, sightless eyes. At once, the rage comes. In a single smooth motion Brynn unsheathes her sword and carves through the scavenger’s neck. It tumbles soundlessly to the dirt, while the wings give a final aborted flap and fall limp across the warrior’s chest.

Brynn steps forward, her motions short and graceless, and falls to her knees to slide her fingers down the corpse’s face and close its eyes forever. It won’t stop the next scavenger who comes. It doesn’t even make her feel better. She picks up a fallen feather, its tip sliced clean by her sword. For the first time since the battle began, she feels a twinge of guilt. The crow, after all, was only following its nature.

Brynn isn’t sure how long she kneels beside the body and the crow. A flicker of motion from the center of the carrion field brings her back to herself, and she raises her eyes to see a lone finger walking among the corpses.

Hela walks with the slow grace of a crane stepping through dark water, head cocked for prey. The necroswords which jut out around her glint like lost fragments of her crown. She has never looked so at home as she does right now, walking through the devastation alone. A silent specter among the crows.

Movement among the bodies draws Brynn’s eye. One of the warriors of Vanaheim, a dagger still lodged in his side, has lurched to his feet. His bloodied hands grasp weakly at the swords which rise from his dead companions, the only thing keeping him upright. Step by staggering step, he approaches Hela’s back. His hand grips the dagger buried between his ribs, and Brynn knows exactly what he plans to do with it.

She leaps to her feet, mouth open to cry out a warning—but before a sound can leave her lips, Hela meets her eye.

There’s no chill running down Brynn’s spine this time. No part of her warning to look away. She’s frozen in place, the world dilating around her like a black field which holds nothing but Hela and herself. It should be terrifying. It isn’t.

The warrior jerks the dagger from his own flesh with a guttural cry, and lunges the final distance. Without breaking their gaze, Hela flings an arm out towards him. The sword which flies from her hand passes straight through him with a sound like ripping cloth, sending the crows rising in a storm of beating wings and dry, throaty cries. He falls on top of the corpses of his comrades and Hela does not spare him a look. For a moment Brynn feels as if the sword had torn through her instead.

But then Hela turns away, and something inside of Brynn releases. The broken crow’s feather is still gripped in her fingers, iridescent, its quill as white as bone. Brynn slips it into a pocket without really knowing why.

As Hela leaves, the black birds descend once more. Brynn wonders whether Huginn and Muninn are among them.

 

* * *

 

There’s no fire tonight in Sigdis’s chambers tonight, no the warmth of wine or good company. There are plenty of good reasons for Sigdis to be away, meetings on troop movements and battle strategies and supply lines; there are plenty more for her not to be here.

Rather than face the absence that fills the room behind her, Brynn has retreated to the balcony to continue cleaning her sword. There’s only starlight and the faint bronze glow that reflects from torches all around the golden city, but she doesn’t need to see. The sword was clean hours ago. She runs the cloth over it again.

Less than a day since the vanguard returned, and already Odin has announced that they will ride out in two weeks. With so few casualties, there’s no reason for them to wait; words echo from Byrnn’s training, advantages that must be pursued, ground which must not be lost. The stars above Asgard are reflected in the sliver of her blade, a swarm of light and color with fresh conquests at every one. Brynn turns the sword until it reflects nothing but darkness.

“I thought I might find you here.”

She’s on her feet in an instant, sword in hand, fur cloak falling around her ankles. Her armor is spread over Sigdis’s bed where Brynn had finished cleaning it, but it may as well be back on Vanaheim for all the good it will do her now. The voice had come from within the room itself. The sheer curtain in the doorway wavers like a wall of smoke. A tall figure which pushes it aside and steps into the faint light of the stars. Brynn recognizes her instantly, and does not lower her sword. Not yet.

 “How did you get in here?” It’s ridiculous to demand anything of the heir to the throne, but Brynn is not in a civil mood.

“Your door was unlocked,” Hela says. Her eyes flicker to the point of Brynn’s sword aimed at her chest. She looks more likely to laugh than have Brynn tried for treason.

Jaw tightening, Brynn reluctantly lowers it. “Yeah, well. I can defend myself.” She slides her blade into its sheath.

 Hela saunters past to position herself at the balcony’s rail. She’s traded her battle armor and cloak for a black tunic and breeches, the shape of swords marked in silver catching the starlight. If the intent is to appear less intimidating, it isn’t working. When Brynn looks at her she can almost see the sharp lines of her crown rising against the stars, like a ghostly halo around her head.

“With all due respect, your majesty,” Brynn says without any respect at all, “what do you want? Commander Sigdis is in the war room with the rest of the battle leaders—”

“I am not here for her.” Hela clasps her hands behind her back and tilts her face to the stars. Her eyes regard Brynn from the side before she closes them entirely; as if the starlight is as warm as the sun, and she’s basking in it. “Is it me you object to, Valkyrie? Or is it what I do?”

“I’d make quite a poor Valkyrie if I was opposed to killing."

“So it is me, then.” Hela’s smile is ironic. Mocking the idea that Brynn’s opinion on her means anything. Her eyes open. Two gleaming slivers in the dark. “We have much work ahead of us. I will need strong warriors at my side.”

“I seem to recall an army’s worth following you into battle.”

Hela chuckles. “Armies do not win wars.”

“Right. You do.”

Hela’s eyes widen at her theatrically. “My, my. You are observant.” She turns to face Brynn in full, leaning back against the balcony’s railing and tilting her head. In her cloth tunic and breeches she feels practically naked. Especially when Hela’s eyes flick over her in such a way.

Brynn almost asks what Hela wants from _her_. But she’s not quite that stupid, yet.

Instead she settles back into her chair, ceding to the fact that Hela is going to tower over her no matter whether she’s standing or not. She picks up the cleaning cloth and begins to polish her sword’s pommel, grateful for an excuse not to meet Hela’s eyes. “Did you break into my chambers to compliment me on my observation skills?”

“ _Your_ chambers?”

Brynn bites her tongue, eyes darting up to Hela’s face in a guilty flash she can’t repress. Hela’s lips are curled in a smirk. It’s a dangerous expression, but for all the wrong reasons. “You care about her.”

Brynn’s jaw tightens. “Is that an accusation?”

“Merely a fact. You aren’t the only one with a keen sense of observation. Not that I would need one, to figure it out. One thing you do lack is discretion.”

Hela’s eyes glint as she steps past Brynn again, past the gossamer curtain which separates Sigdis’s chambers from the night’s chill outside. Hela twitches it aside and steps within, glancing at Brynn over her shoulder through the layer of translucent cloth. For an impossible moment, the cloth blurs Hela’s sharp edges and lightens the darkness of her hair. She could almost look soft, like this. The smile she shoots at Brynn is anything but. “Do you know what we have in common, Valkyrie?”

She steps deeper into the darkness of Sigdis’s room. Brynn has no choice but to follow.  “I have a sneaking suspicion you’re about to tell me.”

It’s as dark as a tomb inside, lit only by the soft gleam of starlight. Hela flicks her wrist, and all at once every brazier in the room surges to life. She saunters further in Sigdis’s quarters while Brynn lingers in the doorway, biting her tongue to stop the rebuke that threatens to rise as Hela’s fingers travel lightly over the rim of Sigdis’s wine glass where it sits by the decanter. She walks not as if she owns the place, but as if she could purchase it for nothing if she really wanted to. It’s all Brynn can do to stand by and pretend there’s a single line that Hela can’t cross.

“We are weapons.” Hela’s back is turned, showing nothing but the long, shaggy train of her hair. She’s smiling when she turns to face Brynn again, but the glint in her eyes is hard. “Wielded by people who believe they are better than us. They let us kill for them, and then turn away from us in shame.”

Brynn crosses her arms over her chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hela smiles as if she’s distinctly aware of the way it sinks to the pit of Brynn’s stomach. She walks over to the bed, the covers neat as Sigdis left them, where Brynn had tossed her armor when she was finished cleaning it. Hela sits on its edge and trails her fingers over the leather and metal, and Brynn has to fight the damning urge to avert her eyes. It’s just as damning to watch.

“Your commander pities the dead. So does Odin. They prescribe to the myth of honor in death.” Hela’s fingers dip down to the coverlet, and come up holding a dark sliver. With a start, Brynn recognizes the crow’s feather she took from the battle field. Hela turns it over in the light, smiling at its purple luster before setting it down again. “As if the conquered give a damn whether the boot on their throat is worn by an honorable foot.”

Brynn forces a laugh. “And you would have us abandon all pretense of justice, and simply pillage every realm like barbarians?”

“You know what separates us from your so-called barbarians?” Her fingers slip into a nook in Brynn’s breastplate, and come out red. A spot of dried blood Brynn missed in her cleaning. Hela rubs it between her thumb and forefinger contemplatively. “Barbarians do not need to believe that conquest is for the good of the conquered in order to stomach the killing.”

Hela tilts her head, and crumbles the dry blood between her fingers. It falls onto the pale grey of Sigdis’s coverlet. “Your commander is that way. I can see it in her eyes. A kind of cloying pity when she stares out over at the field of our victory.” Hela makes a face. “Pathetic, really. But not quite so pathetic as the fact that you mistake her weakness as a strength.”  

“Compassion is not a weakness,” Brynn says through gritted teeth.

“Ah, loyalty. At least that has some worth.” Hela leans back on her hands, fingers exploring the smooth coverlet as if she can feel the lingering warmth of Brynn and Sigdis’s bodies beneath it. When she rises to her feet, Brynn has to stop herself from taking a step back. “There is no honor in killing, Valkyrie. That’s why you’re so good at it.”

“You don’t know me.”

Hela sighs. She takes a step closer. “Perhaps not. But I recognize you.”

Her next step takes her directly into Brynn’s space, and Brynn has to tilt her head back to avoid staring directly into the notch of her collar, as stark as carved bone beneath wet paper. The cold of Hela’s gaze sinks into her, and she can’t look away. It feels different now. The way a winter storm can seep into your bones until it burns hotter than flame. Brynn is not even aware of Hela’s hand moving until the rasp of Brynn’s sword leaving its sheath grates in the silent air between them.

Brynn’s hand catches Hela by the wrist on impulse as she raises the blade between them. With the flat held vertically before Brynn’s face, she can see her own eye reflected in the steel, but doesn’t recognize the expression In it.

“What meaning would you have without this?” Hela smiles; her face appears sliced in half by the blue of Brynn’s sword in front of her face.  Slowly, Hela’s other hand reaches up to close around Brynn’s wrist, her fingers slipping beneath the sleeve to curl around the flesh below. Brynn tries not to shiver, and fails. She still has one hand free. “This is what you are, and all you’ll ever be. There’s no shame in that.”

Brynn jerks her hand away, stepping backwards so quickly she almost falls and leaving her sword in Hela’s hand. “You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” Hela twirls Brynn’s sword for a moment before offering it to her hilt-first, her other hand resting on her hip. “If you were not a Valkyrie, what would you have left?”  

Brynn glares at her a long time before snatching the sword from her hand. “Get out.”

Hela smirks. “Until next time, then.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“No? I think there will be. Death will call you again.”

And then, Hela is gone. The door shuts behind her with a soft click, leaving Valkyrie alone with her thoughts. Her sword is heavy in her hand. She tosses it away from herself with a clatter, and then goes to clean the dried blood off Sigdis’s coverlet.

 

* * *

 

When Sigdis returns it is late enough that Brynn should be asleep. Instead she’s sitting in the stone tub carved into the floor, a broken crow’s feather twirling between her fingertips. The water is up to her collarbones, sloshing higher with every movement to dampen the hollow of her throat; it was scalding when she first sank beneath it. Now it sits against Brynn’s skin like something clammy and unclean.

From the corner of her eye, Brynn watches Sigdis’s boots approach. She keeps her gaze on the flat surface of the water. A film of soap and grime coats the surface like oil. Sigdis stands above her silently, like a judge over her sins, and for a while Brynn hates her; until she closes her eyes the first words that come to her lips are, “I’m sorry.”

A clank of metal on stone. Sigdis kneeling behind her, dry fingers brushing Brynn’s wet hair away from her shoulders. They skim over her skin without ever settling down, then reach out to cup the back of the hand which grips the feather. Sigdis doesn’t ask, and Brynn offers no explanation. The pressure and heat of Sigdis’s lips presses to the crown of her head, and then all of it is gone.

Sigdis rises to remove her armor, and Brynn climbs out of the cold water to slip into the same clothes she wore when Hela’s touch branded her wrist, and leaves without a word.

She sleeps in her own chambers that night, for the first time in weeks. There are cobwebs in the corners that sway in the bronze torchlight reflected from the city beyond the window. The bed is so cold it that the sheets feel slimy against her skin. Brynn lies awake and stares at the darkness, as if watching what’s coming is enough to keep it at bay.


	3. Chapter 3

The beat of Agni’s wings is a familiar rhythm, a second heart pounding in every bone. His breath, however, is wrong. Desperate snorts that suck smoke into his deep-barreled chest. She breathes through her teeth, slowly, until every breath feels like a kind of suffocation. Ash flurries into her eyes. She leans further out in the saddle to stare past Agni’s wings, and looks down into hell.

Muspell is a realm rich in ore and minerals, its volcanic activity stockpiling them like a natural treasury. Of course, the volcanic activity also means the entire planet is on fire at almost any given time. No Asgardian would ever willingly live here. But the war machine is hungry for resources, and so the Bifrost brought them here.

Far below, the fire giants are making their final stand. When the battle began the warriors of Asgard gleamed like living embers in their plate armor, but now soot has dulled them all. The fallen collapse on the burning ground and then start burning themselves. The smell which Brynn is trying not to breathe is laced with cooking meat.

She spots Fenris among the chaos—the giant wolf is hard to miss. He’s tearing the fire giants apart in his teeth, burns streaking his gums that he doesn’t seem to feel. No Asgardian fights at his side; too many have disappeared into his massive jaws already. But no matter how Brynn’s eyes scan the carnage around him, there’s no sign of the one she’s looking for.

The battle climbs up the slopes of a hollow mountain, and Brynn climbs above it; Agni’s shoulder’s heave with every stroke of his wings as if his kicking hooves can gain purchase on the rocks far below. At last they clear the dormant volcano’s edge, and glimpse the chaos seething within it.

At first Brynn thinks the magma has awakened, and nearly yanks Agni’s reigns to send him wheeling out of harm’s reach; but the maelstrom of motion and flame in the center isn’t an oncoming eruption. Agni circles the lip of the volcano, sinking lower and lower, and Brynn stares into the darkness at the center of the flame, the swords which fly from Hela’s hands into the conflagration around her. Hela does not falter, does not hesitate, does not grow tired or weak. It’s a dance. It’s—beautiful.

Without understanding what she’s doing, Brynn digs her heels into Agni’s sides and sends him charging through the air towards the center of the chaos. There is no fighting on the fringes here. In a hurricane, the safest place to stand is in the eye. At the last moment she jerks her feet free of the stirrups and vaults into a crouch on his saddle, yanks Agni’s reigns and sends him back to the sky while she leaps into the chaos below.

For a moment, as she falls to the earth feet-first with her cloak streaming behind her and her sword raised for the first killing blow, Hela’s eyes snap up to hers. Time seems to slow. The heat of the fire giants is like dragon’s breath around her, but in Hela’s eyes there is nothing but that pure, clean cold.

Brynn’s boots hit the rock, her sword decapitates two fire giants in a single swing, and she and the goddess of death are back to back in the center of a hellstorm, and Brynn’s teeth are bared in a grin.

Afterward, when all is grey ash around them, faces of the dead frozen in their final grimaces and collapsing slowly into the air, it is so quiet Brynn thinks she’s gone deaf. She stands a short distance away, sword slick in her hand, ash coating the sweat which pours down her face. There's a gash seared into her thigh, long and ugly; she hardly felt it when the blade raked her flesh, and she hardly feels it now. 

“Valkyrie.”

It’s not a command, but Brynn turns anyway. Hela stands a short distance away, the point of her sword impaled in the rock as she leans on it. She’s wearing the most genuine smile Brynn has ever seen on her lips. The ash swirls around her like snow in the hush. And Brynn still doesn’t know what she’s doing, doesn’t know why she takes that step forward or the one after that, doesn’t know what she’s planning to do when she runs out of distance and there’s only Hela, the goddess of death standing before her as untouchable as a temple frieze—and yet she’s here, right here, and Brynn can almost touch her—

The sound of hoof beats freeze her in place. Hela is just out of reach, the smile gone from her lips. Agni touches down in a storm of grey, his white wings whipping it into a fog. All at once, the distant sound of the battle seems to crest the lip of the volcano and spill down to meet them. The world returns. Brynn turns back to Hela, and whatever was between them is lost in the ash.

“Better get back to it, then,” Brynn says, sheathing her sword and climbing into Agni's saddle, ignoring the flare of pain from her injured leg. “Would hate to be caught shirking the battle.”

Hela laughs. “I am the battle.” When Brynn offers her a hand, Hela clasps it without hesitation, sliding into place pressed close to Brynn’s back. Agni leaps into the sky, circling back out of the volcano and into the marginally fresher air above.

Brynn sucks down a deep breath, trying to get some relief. There is none. Hela’s hands are clasped tight around her middle, and there’s a fire burning in the pit of Brynn’s stomach that devours her oxygen too quickly to use. Brynn feels as bright and sharp as the point of a sword. Her last thought before Agni’s hooves touch down on solid earth and she flings herself back into the fray is that, against all odds, Hela’s presence against the curve of Brynn’s spine is warm.

* * *

 

It’s quiet in the battle camp, except when it isn’t. Another day, another realm falling beneath Asgard’s sword; yet still they linger on the outskirts of their latest conquest, their standards hanging still in the damp air. It’s a nondescript world, tall yellow grass beneath a flat blue sky, castle walls which rise pale and straight from the earth. Brynn walks through the grass at Agni’s side. Their sharp edges rasp against the metal of her armor as she wanders away from the invisible thunderhead building in the air before her.

The arguments have been mounting for some time now. Hela’s battle tent rises high and proud over all others, equal only to Odin’s; and her standard, where it flies at the pinnacle of her tent, is raised slightly higher. Both flags are limp and lifeless now. But the power mounting on the fields makes the hair on Brynn’s arm stand up.

Agni gives a whicker, his wings shifting nervously. She stops, pats a hand on his shoulder and tries to project a calm that she doesn’t feel. The argument had been brewing when she left camp for her scouting flight earlier that morning. There are no words shouted over the afternoon stillness. Brynn doesn’t need to hear them to know what’s happening inside of that tent; she’s seen the aftereffects time and time again.

There’s another reason Brynn is avoiding the camp today. As she brushed Agni down outside of her tent that morning, she’d glanced up into familiar grey eyes. Sigdis had paused, heading no doubt towards the meeting in Odin’s tent. Brynn had glimpsed her often enough over the previous weeks, but never met her eyes. Never been truly seen _._ It was the first time she had Sigdis have been this close since Brynn left her chambers the night that Hela came to her. The sensation was something like a thunderbolt passing through her chest and into the ground, knocking her feet out from under her.

Brynn had looked away first, turning her eyes back to the brush in her hand as if Sigdis was a stranger. It was cruel, and she hates herself for it even now—even an entire day spent as far from her as possible can’t drive the thought of Sigdis from her mind.

Brynn still doesn’t understand the silent decompression that happened between them, doesn’t have the stomach to keep trying. The distance between them yawns wider with every passing day, a gulf too long and dark to peer into, to glimpse the thing that waits at the bottom.

For a moment, there is no movement but the rippling of wind through dry grass. Then she hears it; the sound she’s been waiting for. The thud that every Asgardian feels in their bones as the butt of Odin’s staff meets the ground. It’s how all his disagreements end; with a show of force that inevitably leads Hela furious and desperate for even more blood. But still, it’s an ending.

With a sigh, Brynn guides Agni forward again—until another sound ripples through the air. A sound which she cannot describe; a sound like one enormous piece of metal bending, but not bending. Agni’s ears flick forward with interest, but he doesn’t seem afraid. Brynn hoists herself into his saddle and gallops the rest of the way to the camp, her heart pounding with his hooves.

The guards at the door to Odin’s tent are as forbidding as ever, their halberds crossed before the flap to bar any entry. There are no guards before Hela’s tent. Brynn dismounts, leaves Agni at the entrance and pushes past the dark fabric to the darker interior. She’s stopped waiting for permission realms ago.

With this planet’s latent heat, the tent is lit with witchfire rather than true flame. Its light is pale and greenish under the heavy fabric of Hela’s tent. Sweat leaps up along Brynn’s spine all the same, prickling like a line of needles.

Hela stands with her back to the entrance in her full battle-dress. Brynn hardly sees her out of it these days. The strange light ripples over the green veins in her armor, making them seem to writhe like snakes. She’s holding something; looking at it with all her concentration.

Brynn keeps her distance. But she’s never been good at keeping her tongue.

“So. That didn’t seem to go well.” There’s a large table nearby, spread with charts and markers left over from the planning sessions which sparked Hela’s latest argument. Brynn steps over and picks up a cup of half-finished wine where its owner abandoned it, sniffs its contents and then downs them in a gulp. She hoists herself onto the table, legs swinging beneath her, and watches Hela closely. The wound in her thigh twinges painfully, but Brynn is growing accustomed to ignoring it. 

“We move at dawn.”

Brynn raises an eyebrow, and says nothing. Hela might not be looking at her, but Brynn knows she can sense her skepticism. It’s common knowledge that Odin has pressed for longer and more frequent returns to Asgard. Brynn knows Hela would not have convinced him otherwise with reasonable arguments. Perhaps she hasn’t convinced him otherwise at all.  

Hela’s hands move. A flicker of motion as something spins into the air and then falls down again, and the metal-sound moves through the room again. On instinct Brynn’s hand moves towards her sword; but then Hela turns around, and she’s holding—

“Like it?” It’s a strange, unwieldy weapon; a slab of metal on a short handle, etched with crude runes. As blunt and grey as the nose of a shark.

“It’s hideous,” Brynn says.

Hela takes the massive hammer into one hand and effortlessly flips it again. The sound it makes as it revolves in the air is like nothing Brynn has heard before. In a way she can’t describe, it sounds magnetic. Like some kind of irresistible pull, a nexus which bends around Hela herself. She catches it without effort.

“Forged in the heart of a dying star,” Hela says as she holds it to the light. “Nothing can stop it from returning to my hand. It would pass straight through the roots of a mountain if I wanted it to.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

Hela raises her eyebrows with a smirk, and tosses it in the air again. She catches it as if it weighs nothing. “Why not?”

Brynn shakes her head, reaching for the next dregs of wine. Hela has never been the sort of person to make her smile. She hops off the table, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. “Give it here. I can’t imagine that thing is weighted properly.”

For a moment Hela merely stares at her. Then, her smile broadens. She flips it over in her hands—the weapon moves like magic, that same weightlessness—and offers it to Brynn handle-first. Brynn reaches out to take it without hesitation—

—and is immediately yanked to the floor so hard her shoulder almost pops.

It was as if Hela had handed her a house-sized boulder. For a moment there’s just the intense disorientation of suddenly being stooped over with the hammer on the ground when she had no intention of dropping it, and the sound of Hela’s laughter. Shockingly, it isn’t cruel.

“Sorry,” Hela says, sounding not very sorry at all. “I couldn’t resist.”

When Hela bends down to lift the hammer, Brynn slaps her hand away. “Wait.”

Holding Hela’s gaze, she gets a good hold with both hands on the short handle, and throws her back into the effort of lifting the hammer off the ground. She might as well be trying to uproot a tree trunk with her bare hands. The hammer is part of the ground beneath it. Brynn can’t even make it wobble.

When Brynn looks up again, teeth bared and sweat beading on her brow, Hela is watching her with sharp amusement.

“Magic is cheating,” Brynn says as she straightens up to wipe her forehead.

Hela stoops down and picks the hammer up in a single smooth motion. “But it is rather fun.”

She steps closer—too close. Brynn has to fight the urge to leap backward, and the equal urge to lean into the closeness. But Mjolnir is between them, and Hela leans it forward to tap the center of Brynn’s breastplate gently. Brynn feels its power ripple through her. The awful weight held back only by Hela’s hand.

“With this, we will be unstoppable,” she murmurs, and Brynn can only swallow dryly. She doesn’t ask who Hela means. The army, or the two of them.

“And Odin?”

A twitch in the skin. Hela’s eye narrow, ever so slightly. Mjolnir lifts from Brynn’s chest, and she can breathe easy again at last.

“My father is growing tired of bloodshed,” Hela snaps. She stalks past Brynn to lean forward over the battle plans. “Can you imagine hesitating just before the killing blow? To stop when our total victory is at hand?” With a single gesture she sweeps every marker off the table, and place Mjolnir in the center of the maps, pinning every realm beneath its weight.

“Is it really victory if there is no one to stand against you?”

Hela turns around, disgust turning her mouth down. “Don’t tell me you agree with him.”

“I don’t,” Brynn says immediately, and only realizes that’s treason after she realizes that it’s true. Her fingers fiddle with the hilt of her sword as she avoids Hela’s eyes. “It’s a fair question to wonder what happens when there’s nothing left to conquer.”

Hela turns around. Her anger isn’t gone; it’s collapsed backwards into something else, like a supernova crushing into a black hole. There’s nothing but hunger in the corners of her smile now.

“I don’t know,” she says, stepping up to Brynn and then past her, so close Brynn can feel the slither of her green cloak trailing across her armor as Hela passes by. Brynn stares straight ahead, refusing to turn and watch her go; until Mjolnir leaps off the table as if flung forward by its own gravity, passing inches from Brynn’s face. It’s something like the sensation of a landslide barreling past her.

She whirls around on impulse, to see Hela standing with the hammer quivering in her outstretched hand, the spikes of her helmet sliding into place on her head.

“Shall we find out?” she says, and leaves before Brynn can answer.

* * *

 

The army moves. Like a snake unhinging its jaws to swallow the trail of the cosmos whole, Asgard’s warriors move from battle to battle, continent to continent, world to world without rest. Brynn no longer returns home between campaigns; there’s nothing but a cold and empty bed waiting for her. At times Brynn is not even certain whether she is awake at all; the face of a warrior moments before her sword slips into the shoulder joint of his armor seems like one she glimpsed the night before, or perhaps one she’ll see tonight. Sometimes, the face is more familiar than that, set with accusing grey eyes and wreathed in golden hair.

She’s thought at length at how she would do it. How she would stride up to Sigdis’s tent and let herself in, pour herself some wine and make some pointed comments about how much bigger Sigdis’s tent was, a joke about being spoiled by the spoils of war that Sigdis would answer with a glare. Sigdis would try to remain curt and professional, but Brynn had made an art of crawling under her skin; she’d coax out an eye-roll first, then an exasperated sigh, and finally, blessedly, a smile that would invite Brynn to saunter over and drape her arms around Sigdis’s neck and ask if Sigdis had missed her. What happens after that rarely matters.

Brynn thinks about it over and over, lying awake under the dark steeple of her tent, that she can almost feel herself doing it. The dirt of an unfamiliar world beneath her boots, the warmth of Sigdis’s tent bathing her face as she steps in out of the night. As if she can separate out the person she used to be from whatever she is now, send those pieces out into the night like ghosts homing in on the one thing they remember from life before. It’s about as useless as it sounds.  

When she closes her eyes, it’s not Sigdis who waits for her.

Her dreams of Hela are like glimpses in a dark wood, slivers of her face moving between the tree trunks, eyes that watch her with cruel amusement. When Hela opens her mouth she speaks in the grind of sword on sword, the wet tear of muscle parted from bone. The wound in her thigh throbs like a war drum that grows louder the closer Hela gets. 

Brynn wakes shivering and drenched in sweat, and tries to convince herself it’s terror.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, PLEASE TAKE NOTE, THE RATING OF THIS FIC HAS CHANGED! This chapter contains sexual content, and it's nowhere within the vicinity of emotionally (or physically) healthy. So uh, on that note... Happy New Year? :')

It’s two weeks and four battles before the army splits like a moth-eaten seam.

Brynn can see it coming. Or at least, she tells herself she can. As if the hollow behind Hela’s eyes getting deeper is a sign of anything at all. Or the way Odin keeps his eyes leveled above everything, striding long and seeing nothing. The sagging discipline in the camp. Fights that spark like flint on steel, loyalties yanked in two.

The announcement comes, from heralds rather than from Odin himself, that the army will be decamping to Asgard in three days. At the dawn of the final day Hela’s standard flies high, even as those loyal to her father pull their tents down in silence. The weight inside Hela’s tent is as dense as a collapsing star. Brynn hasn’t set foot inside since Odin’s thinly-veiled ultimatum, and she doesn’t plan to start now.  

Instead, she gathers what she needs and leaves Agni on his hitching post outside of her tent. She makes for the tree line just outside of camp on foot. The chaos and tension of the partial decamp works to her favor. No one wants to meet their fellows eyes, and so she slips away unnoticed.

Her steps are slow but steady; only when she knows she’s out of sight does the grimace set her features, and she limps the rest of the way to the place she knows she won’t be found.

The stream is cold and clear as she shuffles into the clearing. It used to be that she felt a brand burning on her leg in the exact shape of the original wound; now, her entire thigh throbs and pulses like a second heart has wormed itself beneath her skin.

She dips the bowl in the water. Its surface trembles as she sets it on the stone beside her and begins the agony of stripping her armor for the first time in days.

Her greaves stick to the cloth beneath as she slowly lifts them away, dried blood coating the metal. Her teeth are clenched so hard it feels like they might splinter as she loosens the waistband of her breeches and slowly pulls the cloth away. It sticks in a long stripe on the outside of her thigh; with trembling fingers, she eases it free. Green stripes of pus stain the inside of the cloth. The skin looks like something unfit even for the crows to eat.

With a wet cloth and a basin of springwater, she sets to work. This far from the camp, the screams of agony she muffles into her cloak will reach no one. The wound feels hot, as delicate as the wing membrane of a valkyior foal.

By the time she hears the footsteps approaching, her forehead is drenched in sweat and her hands shake with every motion of the cloth. Brynn doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn to look. Not even when they stop a short distance away, and linger the rag she runs over her wound steadily turns the water pink.

“That’s infected.”

Brynn’s hand stills in spite of herself. She can’t remember the last time she heard Sigdis’s voice. Even stiff and reprimanding, it still reaches into her and lodges in a place she thought she’d learned to numb. Brynn hates her a bit, right now, for that.  

She runs the cloth over the inflamed flesh again and keeps her face still, her voice level. “You a doctor now?”

“You could lose the leg.” Sigdis takes a step forward, and then stops again. Brynn isn’t sure what instincts are warring inside of her, and she isn’t about to ask. She checks the stitches where they’re sunken into the swollen flesh, and then pulls her breeches up as swiftly as if it doesn’t hurt.

“Did you need something?” Brynn says as she fastens her belt, and is obscenely proud of the fact that her voice doesn’t tremble once. Not even when she thinks of the way that Sigdis used to undo Brynn’s belt, sliding down to her knees with a smile.

Sigdis is quiet for as long as she can be. Brynn doesn’t look at her. “I’m returning to Asgard with the rest of the army. I thought you should know that.”

“The rest of the army?” Brynn wrings red out of the cloth. It splatters on the dry stone. “I don’t know if you noticed, but there are a whole lot of tents on the field this morning. I wouldn’t call it the rest of the army, so much as _your half_.”

“Really? You’re being glib right now?”

The greaves, then. Brynn slides them on with diligent care, the motions slow and mechanical. “You know me.”

“This isn’t just a family squabble. Hela is betraying Odin’s direct orders by refusing to return. As is anyone else who remains here with her.” When Brynn says nothing, Sigdis steps into her line of sight and leans forward until she can’t be ignored. “It’ll be treason, Brynn.”

“So you’re here for my benefit?” Brynn shoots a hard look at Sigdis, her mouth twisting bitterly. She expects anger. Anger is familiar. But Sigdis is staring her with such open desperation that Brynn has to look away just as quickly, and swallow whatever threatens to come crawling up the back of her throat, words like bile.

“Yes,” Sigdis says through her teeth. “You can choose not to believe it, Brynn, but I still care about you. No matter what you’re trying to become.”

 “What I’m trying to become?” Brynn stoops down to pluck her sword from the stone at her side. From the corner of her eye she glimpses Sigdis step back—before she plunges the blade into its sheath, and slings her shield over her back. “Maybe I’m just tired of trying to be something I’m not. Maybe the only thing I’m becoming is free—free of everything you tried to see in me.”

“You’re wrong, Brynn.” At once her arm is seized in a grip of steel, and Sigdis jerks her around to meet her eyes. “Maybe I did hold you back. Maybe I saw something in you that wasn’t there. But _this isn’t you_ , Brynn. You’re more than this. More than what she says you are.”

Her hand is still on Brynn’s arm, warm and solid. She licks her lips, as if her mouth is too dry to form the words she needs. “I am asking you, please—for your own sake—come back. Come home.”

Brynn stares at her. There’s nowhere else to look. Her eyes are as grey as Asgard’s ever-falling sea on a cloudy day, and it strikes her that Sigdis means it. For her to come home, as if it all meant nothing. And that’s what makes Brynn so angry that she lays her hands on Sigdis’s breastplate and pushes her back so hard she staggers up against a tree, her eyes wide and shocked.

“I’m not good, Sig. You always believed that when we fought, when we killed, it was all for the greater good. And I never did. I couldn’t believe it, even if it was a lie. But I didn’t stop. I just kept doing it. Because I was good at this—” she picks her sword up, feels its familiar weight—“and so this is what I’m going to do.”

Without another word, she turns to make her way back through the trees. Not towards the camp, but into the deeper silence of the woods where no winged horse might spy her from above.

She stays there all day, until the trumpets of Odin’s departing loyalists fade into the misty air, the thunder of the Bifrost whisks the troops off the face of the planet, and Brynn knows Sigdis is gone.

 

* * *

 

It’s night by the time she makes it back to camp. The watchman patrolling the perimeter nearly puts a spear through her throat, until he registers the blue of her Valkyrie sword brandished in his face. They exchange a mutually suspicious look as she moves on among what remains of the army. It’s quiet tonight; tomorrow the camp will move on, but for now the remaining tents stand amid wide gaps, the void where their brothers and sisters in arms used to be.  

She heads for her tent, limping slightly, but no one is watching her now. Her intent is to get very drunk. Tomorrow, the hangover will be bad enough that she will be incapable of thought.

Halfway there, she remembers: the night before, she polished off the last of her stores to dull the pain of her wound enough to sleep. There’s nothing waiting for her there but empty bottles and Sigdis’s voice, played over and over again like the night birds that call and shriek from the treetops bordering the camp.

Brynn changes direction. She thinks she’s heading to the quartermaster to demand a new ration, is almost certain that’s where her unsteady legs are taking her—until she finds herself standing outside the heavy black folds of Hela’s tent. It stands alone now, ringed in braziers that send light rippling ineffectually against the dense canvas. Higher up, no light can touch it. Its peak looms against the night sky like a void in the stars, and Brynn slips inside without hesitation. Hesitation required thought. Thought was the enemy tonight.

The light of the torches outside paints the dark walls with rippling shadows. Dark shapes. The table, bare of markers. The bed. And Hela, sitting at its foot, her hair long and black over her shoulders. Waiting like only death can wait.

Brynn isn’t thinking of Sigdis when she steps forward. Hela move to meet her, so they’re close enough Brynn has to tilt her head back just to hold Hela’s gaze. Further still, as she moves closer into Hela’s space than she’s ever been before. Hela watches her with a gloating smile. A predator watching a wounded deer try and limp away. But Brynn is limping forward, her breaths coming short in the space between them.

She isn’t thinking of Sigdis as she reaches for Hela’s hands. They are warm beneath her own--and that’s still shocking somehow, that Hela is more than a colossus of horned death, that her skin is not as hard and cold as steel, that her hair is more than the cold points of her battle headdress. The touch of skin on skin, of Brynn’s palms on  the backs of Hela’s hands as she raises them to her chest, sets her heart galloping like Agni’s hooves across a battlefield. A desperate charge. Brynn isn’t thinking of Sigdis; she’s clinging desperately to everything around her, an outline she cannot face.

She guides Hela through it, undoing the buckles on her vambraces and sliding them free from her forearms, showing her the clasps on her breastplate and pauldrons to lift them free, one by one. When Hela begins to reach for the next clasp on her own accord, Brynn’s hands tighten around her wrists and Hela’s eyes meet hers in understanding. This needs to be Brynn’s doing, down to the very end. If she is going to destroy herself, she will do it without excuses, without escape routes, without the possibility of ever going back.

So she moves and Hela moves with her, like a dance which strips her piece by piece; she loses her armor and her clothes like pieces of skin, flayed to raw nerves, a softness which shouldn’t be possible here, with _her_ , but which wavers in the air between them like a mirage.

And yet Hela is here, right here, staring down at her from that damnable height with a smile Brynn has never seen before. Brynn doesn’t look at it for long. It’s flayed open too, as soft and fluid as a silk garrote, and for a moment Brynn hates her for it, hates her for being flesh and for having a heart, and so she lets go of Hela’s hands to grab her by the back of her neck and drag her down into something that requires no softness from either of them.

Hela does not kiss softly. Brynn never wanted her to. Her mouth is hard and hungry and unyielding and its bends Brynn’s neck backwards with the force of it. Brynn lets herself be bent. Set free, Hela’s hands set on her like wild dogs. Her nails dig into Brynn’s bare shoulders. Mouths open, teeth clashing, and how could Brynn ever had thought it would lead to anything other than this? It was as inevitable as bleeding out from a chest wound. From the moment she saw Hela standing among the fallen dead, swathed in the green rippling fire of her cloak and crowned in knives. That must have been when the blow was struck. When Hela tore into her the way she is now, across that distance, an echo of something yet to come that shook Brynn to her core.

Hela’s hands close around Brynn’s biceps hold her in place, as she pulls away to stare at Brynn’s face. A shiver moves over Brynn’s skin like something moving across her skin. Hela is still wearing her own armor, the hard rough texture of her battle gear crushing into Brynn’s chest. Brynn arches against it without thinking, seeking pressure and friction. Hela is watching her face, watching the uncurated pleasure move across it, drinking in that vulnerability with a smile that grows wider and wider.

Hela does not remove her armor.

Later, when Brynn is on her back and Hela is kneeling between her legs, tracing the lines of her muscles as if planning to vivisect them, Brynn does think of Sigdis. As Hela’s fingers move up past her knee to the wound that pulses will a dull heat and a sharp pain that Brynn feels even now, their eyes meet and it’s Sigdis staring back from across the forest clearing, her concern and desperation and plea for Brynn to return, _yes, she had begged and Brynn had turned her back._ Her concern.

She blinks, and it’s Hela. Her face unreadable. For a moment Brynn truly believes Hela is about to ask her if she is well.

Until Hela’s nails dig into the swollen skin inches from the wound, and Brynn jackknifes off the bed with a scream half the camp is sure to hear, her fingers clawing at Hela’s wrist, her hair, the pain like a bolt of lightning that splits her to the core, that rises up behind her eyes like a tide that fills and crashes and drags her along with it—and Brynn is so full of wrath and agony and pulsing desperation that when she shoves Hela’s hand between her legs, it’s only an instant before she’s coming undone, her teeth buried in Hela’s collarbone with the sound of cold laughter against her hair.

 

* * *

 

Afterward, they lay in bed with their limbs mashed together into a tangle, and Brynn feels a cold so deep she can’t move. There’s no intimacy here. Hela’s hand strokes her hair with the idle motions she might lavish on a clever pet. Brynn wants to leave, but can’t figure out how. No, that isn’t right. She wants to _want_ to leave, and can’t figure that out either.

Hela leans in. After everything, her voice is remarkable clear. “One day, Asgard will be mine alone.” Her smile curls around the shell of Brynn’s ear. Brynn feels the brush of her teeth, a hard edge. “On that day, I will need an executioner of my own.”

Brynn says nothing. That, in itself, is damning enough.

 

* * *

 

The army marches across the rest of the realm, their boots churning its fields and flowers to mud. Perhaps spies among the resistance saw Odin’s faction leave; the defenders fight with renewed vigor, and die in much greater numbers. Brynn wants to tell them it’s pointless, that Hela is a great wave that can never be resisted, but the fighters only take heed of her sword. So she uses it, and proves herself right.

Brynn has not asked Hela what will happen when the time comes to seek a new world to conquer. Whether Heimdall will answer to Hela’s authority, and open the Bifrost to let them pass. If others share the same question, none ask it. Ravens arrive with messages that only Hela hears. Brynn is almost surprised every time they fly from the tent unscathed—perhaps Hugnin and Munin cannot be killed at all.

“Those fools who followed my father will change their tune, when we send back mountains of riches.”

 

She returns to Hela’s tent many times herself. She feels the same amazement each time she leaves with her life.

They are in the midst of the killing blow when Odin’s army returns.

Harried by saboteurs and guerilla bands in the woods, their long march to the city of green glass and white trees is finally at an end. On the farming fields outside its delicate walls, Hela’s army meets with the world’s ragged defenders. Their conviction makes them formidable. Brynn has no conviction at all, but she is very good at what she does. 

The earth is soft beneath her boots as she tackles her adversary to the ground. Her sword goes into him easy, clean. It’s less about being humane and more about the principle of the thing. Getting to her feet is less natural, the dirt shifting and clinging to her as she staggers. This is farmland, fields tilled soft and damp, and it drags her down again like a blanket of sleep. Head reeling on her neck. Can’t seem to keep it on straight lately, with the stripe of pain on her thigh defined so clearly that it sears black and colorless against her eyelids, a slash in the fabric of her vision that burns straight through to her brain. She has to peer past it, as she claws to her feet in time to meet the next blows. She hasn’t checked the bandages in days.

Nearby, she knows Hela by the crunch of armor that rings out in a nexus around her, the metal groan of Mjolnir carving swaths of destruction through their enemies. Brynn slices through the scab over her vision, feels her sword hit home before she sees the bloody result. Agni is somewhere up above, the ground too soft for his hooves.

She’s wiping the blood from her face when she hears it. The thunder and hum that plucks every nerve and sinew like a tuned string, the familiar unforgettable rush of something pouring towards you across the heavens. No Asgardian ever forgets the sensation of the Bifrost opening. Brynn turns, her mouth half-open in a silent cry, and the words blaze across her mind as she sees the rainbow column punch into the earth: _home, home, it’s here to take me home—_

It does not take her away. The light vanishes, and in its place—

She barely manages to duck beneath her shield as the first wave of Asgardian spears falls like rain around her. The point of one punches straight through her shield, vibrating to a halt an inch from her left eye. For a moment Brynn can only blink at it, uncomprehending. Reinforcements? Could they not see they were attacking their own people?

She raised her head over the edge of her shield to see Odin move to the front of the column on Sleipnir’s back. The battle flags around them, Hela’s faction and the world’s defenders hesitating as they wait to see which way the scales will tip. Brynn knows instantly. She can see it in his face. He stares across the battle and Brynn knows he’s looking at Hela, his gaze blank and pitiless. The hair on Brynn’s neck rises like hackles as the energy in the air builds. Over Brynn’s head, the first wave of Hela’s swords flies towards Odin’s army. And it begins.

 

* * *

 

The battle drags on forever. Odin must have waited, Brynn reflects, had Heimdall marking Hela’s warpath across the world, sacrificing the lesser towns and the lives of their loyal defenders so that it all might lead to this—Hela with her teeth buried in the throat of one army, so that Odin’s might latch onto her back. If it was any other, fighting a battle on two fronts would be impossible. But it’s Hela, and they fight on.

Brynn is too far gone to distinguish whether she plunges her sword through a stranger’s breastplate or an Asgardian one. Both are trying to kill her, so she affords them equal treatment. Her leg is like splintering wood, ripping paper, ragged and coming apart beneath her; when the blow swings towards her and her sword catches her enemy’s, their blades grinding together inches from Bynn’s face, it takes her a second too long to realize that both swords are blue.

The blow lands perfectly, a kick that pistons into the exact spot of Brynn’s wound. Her vision goes black. She’s vaguely aware of screaming as she falls to the muddy earth, her sword slipping from her fingers—and vaguely, from far away, she thinks about how Sigdis must have held onto their conversation in the woods, must have revisited that memory not with grief or fondness but instead with the mind of a tactician, staring through the concern in her own eyes to instead confirm the exact location of Brynn’s weakness, and turn that kindness against her.

Brynn ebbs back into herself slowly, slumped in the dirt with her breath ragged in her throat. Sigdis’s steel boots are just before her, the tip of her Valkyior sword swinging into Brynn’s field of vision; not to deliver the killing blow, but lowering her weapon. For her, the fight is already over.

Brynn’s teeth bare in a silently snarl, her breath hissing sharply. Her sword has fallen mere inches from Brynn’s hand. She clenches her fist in the dirt and lets the fury drown the pain.

Sigdis leans down. “Brynn—”

Brynn’s hand clasps her sword, and she surges to her feet with an arc of her blade, momentum slamming her into Sigdis and carrying them both backwards. Some small part of Sigdis must have known this was coming, for her sword flew up to block the blow before Brynn had a chance to force past her defenses.

Their blades wind and lock and wheel away, just before Brynn’s leg gives out again—but this time she is expecting it, turns it into a duck and a feint as she gathers her strength again, swaying on her feet with her eyes locked on Sigdis. Her expression is wild. Fear as well as desperation clouds her face.

“It’s over, Brynn!” she cries, but does not lower her sword.

“Then finish it,” Brynn spits, and charges again. Her movements are sloppy, her only footwork managing to stay on her feet at all—but Sigdis has trained with her many times, and was fighting the memory of Brynn she knew to expect. Brynn’s drunken blows blur past the familiar dance Sigdis falls into without intending to, throwing her off balance.

Brynn’s sword hammers at hers in a storm, until she had to wheel away and gasp for breath before her leg collapsed again, staggering just out of Sigdis’s reach. She’s vaguely aware of drifting closer to the center of the conflict, where the terrain explodes and bolts of power crackle through the air as Odin and Hela tear each other apart.

Dirt is flung into the air by some terrible impact, scrabbling over Brynn’s armor like grasping nails. Every blow of Sigdis’s sword against her own jars deep into her bones. She slowing. Getting weaker. But Sigdis is holding back, unwilling to deliver a killing blow even when Brynn’s failing guard gives her opportunity after opportunity. It’s that hesitation that Brynn shoves up against now, holding nothing back, _do it, you coward, just give me up—_

The opening comes like a break in the clouds, and Brynn is moving before she consciously decides to take it. Sigdis’s sword catches hers at the exact wrong angle, and she dips the blade and _twists_ , the movement hammered into Brynn in so many drills she could have performed it while sleeping, let alone delirious. Sigdis’s wrist twists at an unforgiving angle. Her sword falls from her hand.

Even with the battle raging around them, everything goes still. The point of Brynn’s sword rests against Sigdis’s throat, above her armor, crowned by a bead of blood. Sigdis’s eyes are wide. Brynn realizes in that moment that she truly expects her to do it. A small amount of pressure is all that stands between Brynn and a world without those grey eyes piercing into her. She could walk into that world unburdened. Free.

_We are weapons._

Brynn adjusts her grip on her sword. Her hands are sweating, shaking. The tip of her sword draws more blood against Sigdis’s neck, and still she says nothing. Doesn’t beg. Doesn’t try to reason. Just stares at Brynn, and waits for her decision.

_They let us kill for them, and then turn away from us in shame._

Sigdis doesn’t look away.

_This is what you are, and all you’ll ever be—_

No.

_You’re more than this._ The memory of Sigdis’s voice is clearer than the ring of steel on steel, clearer than the pain that lashes her leg, and the blue of Sigdis’s eyes. Eyes that see her without flinching, and without scanning for weak points to grab hold and twist.

When Brynn lowers her sword, Sigdis’s chest rises and falls with relief. Brynn lets her sword-arm fall limply by her side, the tip of her blade dragging in the dirt. She feels nothing as she steps past Sigdis, who lets her go with a hand pressed to the blood on her throat. The battle is something happening around her, but it cannot touch her. She staggers in Hela’s direction, nearly falling. Somehow she manages to make it over the rise in the soft earth, drawn there by a chain moored in her chest.

Hela stands in the middle of a crater, bodies a shining sunburst around her. Odin is driven back, his staff held high as his soldiers pour towards Hela. Brynn sways at the peak of the depression, unsure even of what she’s doing. She needs to see. The wound in her leg writhes like a snake burrowing deeper.

Brynn shoves past a body as it slumps to the ground with a necro sword in its chest, and Hela meets her gaze. There’s no recognition in it. Only that all-consuming hunger that Brynn once thought she could slake. Hela will not be satisfied to devour her. She will not be satisfied to swallow the cosmos whole.  

When the sword comes into Brynn’s back, between the plates in her armor and skimming neatly between her ribs to jam up against the inside of her breastplate with a scrape of metal that jolts through her faster than the pain, she’s still staring into Hela’s eyes. Hot breath stirs the hair by Brynn’s ear, a gasp of pain mirroring her own.

“I’m sorry,” Sigdis whispers against her neck. “I’m sorry—”

Hela watches as Brynn falls, Sigdis’s arms lowering her to the soft earth. They linger a moment longer, as the cold seeps into Brynn’s chest. Hela is the goddess of death. Brynn should feel closer to her now than any other. But it strikes her, as Hela regards her with nothing but cool disappointment, that death can be given or taken, but never truly owned. Not by Brynn. Not even by Hela herself.

The sword wrenches free, and Brynn falls into nothing at all.


	5. Chapter 5

The first thing is not pain, but an emptiness where pain should be. A constant companion, gone. That, in itself, is even more terrifying. Brynn struggles out of a sleep that isn’t sleep, her tongue as thick and useless as syrup sloshing around her mouth, eyelids so heavy she can scarcely pry open the darkness. Blurred shapes. A sliver of light. Hands touch her shoulders and a voice speaks words and she is pressed into oblivion as surely as being held beneath a torrent of water.

 

* * *

 

The next time, it is better.

Her limbs are so heavy she cannot even try to push herself up. Instinct sets her heart pounding: something is wrong, she needs to move, to get away from whatever got her—but there’s lead in her bones. Lead in her skull. The panic of not being able to move is as far away as the desire to do so in the first place. Slowly, she opens her eyes.

The warm glow of familiar light washes over her face. Not torches. Not the sickly green tongues of Hela’s witchlight. The lamps set in the walls around her as graceful and without flame, as warm as fire but without its choking smoke. The room is dark, but Brynn doesn’t need light to know exactly where she is. Even the air smells so familiar it threatens to split her open like rotting fruit. Asgard. She’s—home.

“We thought you might wake up today.”

The voice is friendly, gentle, and unfamiliar. She manages to turn her head, letting gravity move it to the side so she can regard the medic scanning her with his miniature diagnostic. He meets her eyes with a smile. “You Valkyrior are made of sterner stuff than most. That infection should have killed you long before you had a chance to get stabbed in the back.” He keeps his tone light. “Luckily, someone had already stopped your bleeding by the time you arrived on Asgard. It will take time, but you should make a full recovery.”

Brynn tries to speak, and fails. The medic is absorbed in his own work as she wets her cracked lips, tries to swallow enough saliva to reclaim her throat.

“How—” The word sounds _awful_ , but it’s a victory of its own. The medic glances at her in surprise.

“It’s been four days since you were brought to us. You were incredibly lucky—the sword missed any crucial organs, and it seems you were given medical attention almost immediately afterward.”

Brynn closes her eyes, too weak to shake her head. “How—how did I get here?”

The medic blinks. “You were brought back with the rest of the wounded.”

“Who.”

“Another Valkyior. I can’t remember her name, but she did ask to be informed when you awoke. No doubt she will want to see you soon.”

Brynn lies silently a while longer while the medic’s tool produces musical hums which evidently mean something to him. Things are beginning to settle in the room around her; she can wiggle her toes, her fingers, move her head with more freedom.

Most importantly, she can tell that she is totally unrestrained. No shackles. Unexpected. They ought to know better than to rely on drugs to keep a captive Valkyior in place.

Eventually, she lances the question like a boil. “Hela?”

“Defeated. Though only narrowly, as I understand it. Your sacrifice was not in vain.”

The pieces don’t line up. Brynn blinks up at him, waiting for the haze in her mind to clear. Seeing the confusion on her face, the medic lowers his holographic display to regard her with his full attention. “They told me what you did—how you remained behind with Hela’s camp to convince her to see reason. And when that failed, how you turned on her in the battle when Asgard needed it most.”

His hand rests on her shoulder, heavy and warm. “Do not fear that your actions will be misconstrued. Odin recognizes that you are a hero.”

 With a businesslike snap, the medic closes the glowing display that haloed his hand. “I know things must be very confusing to you now. It will be easier once you’ve rested. All you need to know is that you’re safe now. You made it back.”

Brynn doesn’t try to stop him as he leaves. The questions brewing in her head aren’t ones she could ask even with a functioning body. She has no doubt who it was who returned her to Asgard; it must have been Sigdis who spun the lie as well. Would they have treated her so well if Sigdis has returned with her as a crippled prisoner of war? Or would Brynn be awakening to a cold cell in the dungeons with only a cauterized stump where her injured leg used to be?

So many questions. And one above all: why would Sigdis help her in the first place?

Easier to let unconsciousness take her again.

 

* * *

 

In the weeks to come, progress is slow and painful and comprised almost entirely of waiting. The medics get her a set of leg braces when she falls out of bed the fourth time while trying to walk. The braces support her weight entirely, let her walk a stilt-legged back and forth across her room; almost immediately she dials down the support from 100 percent to 90, falls, bumps it up to 95, and manages to limp around the room with her leg screaming in agony before collapsing back into the bed. She stares at the ceiling and digs her fingernails into the skin around her healing wound, and waits for Sigdis to come for her.

She doesn’t. In the end, Brynn can hardly bring herself to be angry. A clean break. If Sigdis can let it go, so will she.  

Asgard’s science may have advanced far beyond those of the other realms, but Brynn’s slow, limping walks around her bedroom are the only way to teach her muscles to work in tandem again. Her walks move out into the hallway, pacing up and down like a caged direwolf. Eventually she makes it down to the stables, and finds Agni grounded and dull-eyed in a stall scarcely big enough to stretch his legs, let alone his wings.

His ears perk up the second she limps through the door. She won’t be able to ride again for a long time, but she makes it a point to visit him often. Something comes to life in both of them when they’re together; even if it’s just a memory of the battle fever. Brynn will take what she can get these days.

She thinks of Hela sometimes. At night, when the shadows can no longer be kept at bay. Brynn tries not to sleep, but her dreams are patient. She sees the rippling green of Hela’s cloak move through the darkness; she tries to run, but Hela pursues her on Fenris’s legs, her black hair a long pelt spilling over her shoulders, her mouth impossibly wide as the spikes of her crown push out through her gums. She falls on Brynn and tears her apart, and there’s not one flicker of recognition in her eyes.

Brynn wakes up sweating, terrified, but silent—she doesn’t want to become one of the patients who scream themselves awake every night, coming back to themselves in the shame of the heavy silence that falls after their cries fade away. Brynn suffers privately. It’s a bad thing to be proud of, but she’s been proud of worse.

Her dreams of Hela, at least, feel authentic. When she dreams of Sigdis it’s a swirl of color and sensation, the cold smoothness of Sigdis’s sheets and the jar of sword-on-sword, lips brushing the inside of her thigh and the hard surety of steel sliding into her back. It’s not the agony and the fury that Brynn relives again and again. It’s the anguish in the words Sigdis whispered against her neck, the way her hands had released the sword so she might gently lower Brynn to the ground.

In the end, Brynn gives in; maybe she’s always been the weaker one. She sends Sigdis a message, and then waits for it all to end.

 

* * *

 

Sigdis arrives five days after Brynn sends her message, and two days after Brynn gives up hope of her coming. It’s the time of morning when the sunlight drifts between Asgard’s towers outside her window, and throws itself on the blankets across her legs. The warmth feels good on Brynn’s injured thigh. It also feels good just to lie there. But when she hears the sound of a throat being quietly cleared, and turns her head to the door—the shock of seeing Sigdis standing in the threshold is enough to send the pain pounding through her wound like it had never begun to heal.  

Slowly, carefully, Brynn pushes herself up so she’s propped against the headboard. Neither of them say anything; after a moment, Sigdis steps inside and closes the door behind her. The hallway was quiet before, but with the door shut the silence chokes the air.

Brynn wishes desperately that she’d put her leg braces on this morning, so she could stand up and face Sigdis on even terms. All she can do is keep her face set, and ignore the roiling emotions that threaten to surge up her throat.

“So,” she says flatly. “You did get my message.”

Sigdis nods. She drifts away from the door, but not towards Brynn—moving instead to the opposite side of the room, putting as much distance between them as possible. “I came as soon as I could. There has been much to do.”

Brynn graciously allows the lie to pass. If Sigdis wanted to be here there would be nothing to stop her from coming. “They’re keeping Agni in the stables here,” Brynn says. “He’s not happy. They can’t care for him here.”

Sigdis nods, looking relieved to have such an easy problem to solve. “Of course. I’ll take care of it.”

There are so many things Brynn wants to say, so many things she wants to _demand_ , but she makes herself stay silent. Instead waits for the silence to squeeze Sigdis like a vice.

“You look well,” Sigdis says at last, her eyes darting over Brynn’s prone frame before looking away too quickly.

Brynn forces a laugh. “I guess I should be thanking you. If you’d stabbed me a little less carefully, I’d be dead right now.”

Sigdis turns away. Brynn can read the guilt in the taut line of her shoulders. She realizes her own hands are clenched on the bedcovers, nails biting her palms through the thin layer of sheets. She forces them to relax. “And what of Hela?”

“She’s gone.” Sigdis glances at her, trying to read Brynn’s reaction. Brynn keeps her expression blank—this time, is isn’t hard. She feels almost nothing. “Imprisoned in some dimension Odin carved out. The Valkyior are grounded—the armies will march no more.” Sigdis’s mouth twists in nothing resembling a smile. “It seems you were right. Odin lost his stomach for conquest.”

Brynn laughs hollowly. “Or he just realized he had scraped enough riches out of the realms to last even an Asgardian lifetime. Or is he releasing the realms he and Hela conquered back to their own governance?”

Sigdis’s silence is answer enough. A flicker of guilt stirs to life in the pit of Brynn’s stomach. “So,” she says as lightly as she could manage. “What’s the final tally?”

For a moment it seems Sigdis isn’t going to answer, but then she looks away and lets out a long, tired breath. “Nine.”

“Nine realms,” Brynn repeats softly. “It does have a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” The taste in her mouth is bitter as blood. “I guess we should be proud of ourselves.”

Sigdis’s face doesn’t soften so much as it crumbles. “Brynn…”

“You shouldn’t have lied for me,” Brynn says before Sigdis can continue. “I should be in a prison right now.”

“Actually, you should be dead.” Sigdis avoids her eyes. “If I was going to take your life into my hands—well, I decided I might as well give you a better ending than that.”

Brynn’s smile was cold. “Wow, Sig. You almost sound like me.” Sigdis says nothing. Brynn lies in bed, arms crossed over her chest. “Is that what this is, then? An ending?”

Sigdis’s fingers drag through her hair. “I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t you come sooner?”

“I thought that would be obvious.”

“Don’t do that.”

The warning in Brynn’s voice is enough to stop Sigdis short. She turns away, looking out the window toward the gleaming towers of Asgard. The localized field that keeps the outside air at bay is nothing more than a shimmer against the stonework. “I assumed you wouldn’t want to see me.”

“Is that all?”

She turns around. Her face is hard now, harder than it had been even on the battlefield. “No. It isn’t all. I didn’t want to see you. Is that what you want to hear?”

Brynn turns away, staring out the window. “I see.”

The silence draws out. It’s very bright outside—the sunlight reflects off bridges, towers, Asgard’s gleaming legacy. It hurts Brynn’s eyes to look, but she stares until her vision blurs.

“I almost killed you.” Sigdis voice comes so hard and sudden out of the silence that Brynn’s eyes flick up to meet hers before she can think the better of it. Sigdis stands with her fists balled at her sides, her shoulders tense as if ready to spring forward—but she holds herself back, on the other side of the room, as if the space between them is utterly impassable.

Brynn shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe I deserved it.”

Sigdis is silent for a long time. “I almost thought you did. I really believed it, for a while. You betrayed Asgard, betrayed our order, betrayed—” When Sigdis raises her eyes, it isn’t anger Brynn sees in them. Rather a kind of tortured desperation. “Maybe you deserved to bleed out on that battlefield. But if that’s the case, then so did I.”

Brynn just stares at her—and then the augh comes, short and harsh, tearing past her lips before she can stop it. “Oh, come on, Sig. I really don’t have the patience to listen to you try and claim this was all your fault.”

“Brynn, will you just _listen_ to me—”

“No!” Brynn’s voice lashes out across the room like a whip. At once she’s sitting up in bed, swinging her les over the side as if to get up and start pacing. The wrench of agony in her thigh holds her in place, her fingers clenched on the edge of the bed through the pain. “I’m not going to let you stand there and say that I deserve to be let off easy. This was _my_ choice—”

“Hela manipulated you—”

“That wasn’t all it was! She saw something no one else wanted to see, something that had always—”

Brynn stopped. Made herself think about what she was about to say. “I never believed in what we were doing, okay? I kept fighting, kept killing, because it was what I knew how to do. I did it because if _you_ were doing it, then it must be right.

“But then you stopped believing, and I couldn’t feel that. Couldn’t make myself see the difference. And Hela—she saw that hole in me from the very beginning, and shined a light down into it. And once she did, it was all I could see.”

Brynn couldn’t look. Couldn’t meet Sigdis’s eye. She stared instead at her own fingers knotted together in her lap. Her nails were bitten so far that the tips of her fingers jutted past them, awkward and swollen. “I don’t want your forgiveness,” Brynn says at last. “I don’t deserve it.”

When Sigdis’s hand enters her field of vision, Brynn almost jumps. She hadn’t heard Sigdis cross that vast distance between them, and yet here she is—an arm’s reach away, her fingers settling on Brynn’s with a grip of steel.

“This isn’t the part where I offer my forgiveness.” This close, Sigdis’s voice is little more than a breath of air. “I’m not the one who gets to lead you back into the light. I have no fucking right.”

Brynn stares at her, keeping her face blank. Sigdis’s gaze bores into her own as if reaching for something deep inside her. “You’re right,” Sigdis says. “I knew in my bones that it was wrong, and I stood by Odin’s side all the same. Out of loyalty. Complacency. Because it was easier to keep pouring blood into Asgard’s foundations than to admit they had been built on blood from the beginning.”

Sigdis’s eyes drop to their hands—she seems to realize what she’s doing. Her hand releases Brynn and pulls away too quickly. “We’re all guilty, Brynn,” she says quietly. “Every one of us who ever raised a sword against the innocent in Asgard’s name, every one of us who said we were bringing light and culture to the dark corners of the galaxy. Hela, Odin—they wanted the same things. I have no more right to offer you forgiveness than I have the right to ask for yours.”  

A strange feeling is creeping its way through Brynn’s chest. It reminds her of ice crystals softening and melting, one by one. “Good,” she says lamely. “I wasn’t going to give it to you anyway. You stabbed me in the back, you know.”

Sigdis glances up at her in surprise—a flicker of pained amusement touches her lips. “Would it mean anything to say I was very, _very_ careful about it?”

“Not really. Couldn’t you have just knocked me over the head or something?”

“Don’t pretend like that would have slowed you down for a second.”

“True. Head trauma just tends to make me dumber and angrier than before.”

Sigdis tilts her head, the smile on her lips growing. “Which, in itself, is no small feat.”

The laugh they share is short and stunted, but it leaves Brynn trembling. Like she’s balanced on the edge of something and desperately holding herself still, knowing there’s two ways to fall and one of them is a bottomless pit.

She licks her dry lips. And lets herself fall. “Why did you come, Sig?”  

Sigdis glances up at her, looks away too quickly. “I—” Her face twists with a look of pain she fixes on the floor. “I don’t know what I deserve. But I know I still want you. So I had to ask if—if there’s still anything—”

She falters. In a far-off way, it strikes Brynn that she’s never seen Sigdis so uncertain of anything before. She has always been the Commander, the unquestionable orders, the straight line of a sword that moves without the capacity for doubt. Sigdis’s eyes haven’t left the floor. She seems to be bracing herself for whatever Brynn is about to say.

When Brynn’s hand crosses the distance between them to touch the inside of Sigdis’s wrist, she starts like a startled horse. Brynn isn’t sure what to say. She’s never been good at any of this, not even when things were easy between them. _I spent all our time apart trying to believe you weren’t still a part of me._ Her mouth won’t form the words. She has to hope her eyes can say as much.

Brynn clears her throat, glancing between Sigdis’s eyes and the hand she shifts to encircle Sigdis’s wrist. “I, uh. Yes.” She takes a breath, and tightens her grip. It’s not her most eloquent. But it will do. “Yes.”

The pain lifts off Sigdis’s face like a flock of birds. She stares into Brynn’s eyes as if trying to drain them into herself. Her own hand reaches to touch the back of Brynn’s, and then their fingers are tangling together, warm and solid.

“Okay,” Sigdis says through her smile. The window at her back kindles her blonde hair; Brynn used to think it looked like gold. Now she thinks it’s like the sunlight itself, and no amount of blood could ever buy it.

At once, the memory cuts through Brynn like a blade: of Hela standing before her, a hand resting on Brynn’s sword-arm. _What meaning would you have without this?_

Brynn stares into Sigdis’s face, and knows.

She pulls Sigdis forward until their lips meet, chaste, gentle, not so much a kiss as the first step down a path they’ll walk slowly, but together. Sigdis pulls back a moment later, her eyes soft. Light comes around her like a halo, bright shafts flowing away from her or into her, and for a moment Sigdis is wreathed in swords.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does it count as a happy ending if I stop before the sad part? :')
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has read this story! I feel like I probably bit off more than I could chew with trying to tackle the issue of Asgard as a colonial power alongside such a difficult relationship to write, but hopefully it worked out in the end. I hope you've enjoyed it!


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